The show includes seven drawings by Austin
artist Alyson Fox. For her canvases, the artist used found
book covers. The images are delicate and transfixing family
sagas featuring nameless and faceless characters. “My
drawings are an ongoing series of one made up little family
with half true narratives,” explains Fox. “I work from my
own relationships and frustrations to develop the stories.
The main themes in the work are sexual angst, gender roles,
the play between objects and humans, violence and
curiosity.”
Fox uses ink, colored pencil and watercolors
to create her simplified human forms, which are drawn in
contour with blank faces. An abundance of vacant space
surrounds the images; allowing the viewer to conceptually
fill in the story and choose their own endings, particularly
ones that entail an ominous portent of things to come.
John Mulvany’s oil and
acrylic paintings are equally haunting. For example, in
“Fall” (36x36 acrylic/oil on canvas), two young boys are
wielding rifles outside a suburban home. They are wearing
black suits and appear to be standing; yet their pants
descend into a whirl of black, emanating from the earth.
Suddenly the boys are no longer boys, but dark specters,
surrounded by colors that are both fiery and autumnal.
“In 1996, I visited Mexico
for the first time. Having been born and raised in Ireland,
Mexico was an amazingly exotic and alien place,” explains
Mulvany, who now lives in Austin. “Then I began to see
parallels between Mexican art and culture and Irish Celtic
culture; the mixture of Catholicism and pagan indigenous
cultures, the sense of a society coming to terms with its
unique character and history after centuries of colonial and
religious domination and particularly the enduring strength
of folk art and literary mythology.”
After visiting Frida
Khalo’s house in Mexico City, Mulvany was struck by her
collection of Retablos,
postcard-sized paintings, full of religious and mythological
imagery, portraying miracles and saintly interventions in
everyday life. “The images were painted in a manner which
suggested they were revealed to the artist in a flash then
fixed directly on the surface,” says Mulvany, whose work
conveys a similar sense of immediacy and revelation while
appearing remarkable reflective. “In my paintings I try to
explore ideas of dogma, superstition and fundamentalism in
religion and politics using images from the past, from Irish
and American history, juxtaposed with contemporary suburban
settings. For me they represent the constant intrusion of
the past into our lives.”
Morgan Sorne
also deals with history, ritual and tradition in his work.
“One Someone Anyone” features ten
of Sorne’s mixed media pieces, nine of which are life-size
paintings of children dressed in wild colors and patterns.
Some of the children carry knives and spears, and are
wearing extravagant attire, such as ornate headdresses and
hot pink tights featuring red hearts. He calls these
children his moon kids, and there is certainly something
otherworldly about them. But they, like all of the images in
his work, also represent very human themes.
“My work currently deals
with rituals, traditions, rites of passage, loss, and the
spirit child,” explains Sorne, who finds many of characters
and environments in books, then cuts them out in order to
create intricately layered drawings and paintings. “This
work represents a reconciliation with personal trials and
tribulations from my childhood,” says Sorne. “It’s also
about perceptions of innocence and how those perceptions
shape and define one’s identity.” Despite the serious
thematic aspects of the work, Sorne also captures the
whimsical nature of the human experience.
Bret Aaker also calls
attention to the unpredictable with his “Capricious Series,”
a succession of rich paintings featuring images culled from
a series of Francisco Goya etchings from 1799. Caprice means
a sudden unexpected action or change of mind. The Goya
series was entitled Los Caprichos.
“These prints illustrated a Spanish society of vain, greedy,
and impulsive people where reason had gone to sleep,” says
Aacker. “He used allegorical and fantastic images to
illustrate his commentary of what he observed. Explaining
one of his etchings he wrote, ‘He who yesterday played the
part of the bull today plays the bull fighter.’”
Aaker placed the images on
a field of color, removing details and blotting out their
faces. He rearranged the figures, creating new compositions.
Large expanses of solid colors paired with fluid contours
and animated figurines recall the work of Henri Matisse, yet
the work is truly his own.
